Some things have names that are deceptions; famously the Greenland-Iceland switcheroo. Other things are named so perfectly, they couldn’t possibly bear any other name. Sleepy old Mud Lake was no ruse. While my brothers, cousins, parents, aunts, uncles, and my little baby sister would wear knockoff “aqua socks” to wade into the water, the loose-bottomed lake floor felt not all that different than what lay at the bottom of our outhouse. That, plus endless seaweeds.
Wamplers Lake, just on the other side of Wamplers Lake Highway was where people went to have a day at the lake barbecuing, swimming, driving speedboats, and swimming from a sandy beach. Mud Lake people all know Wamplers, we can hear it through traffic and a woods on the far side of the lake; nobody on Wamplers even knows that Mud Lakes exists. That’s where our family had bought the white and red cottage with the flaking paint and moss under the slats when we were growing up. The old woman who owned it before us had died, and her estate didn’t want to deal with the mounds of her hoarded curio and brick-a-brack collection that’d filled the garage and littered the mantle of the fieldstone fireplace with silver dollars pressed into the concrete.
We spent the growing-up-summers there. A week per family, and then a week for everyone. Leapfrogging like that all summer long. The men tore off the roof one year and built a second-floor loft with a peaked ceiling. Facing the lake, they built in windows bought for “a good deal” from the Deerfield schoolhouse where most of the adults had gone to grades 1–12, all in one building. The windows had a rudimentary but ingenious pulley system that included a tiny hole in the wall where a series of knotted loops could be heaved down and over a thoughtfully placed hook. Everything about the place was somewhere between second and eighth-hand, or made by someone.
The metal dock sank unevenly into the mud but still served as a launch point for two aluminum row boats and a pontoon boat bought at a garage sale for $50 and refurbished with plywood and paint. Apparently, there’d been no garage sale finds of boat engines because most of the time, we’d row that beast out into the middle of the lake past the soft bottom; past what the neighbor kid called “pike land” which was where you couldn’t touch the bottom, but there were tall weeds that you could see just under the surface; out past the drop-off. That’s where you could swim. We’d be on the water all day, fishing and swimming, then row in, eat a hamburger that our uncle had seasoned with the beer he was drinking, and play some board games on the back porch well after dark.
When we got into our teen years, we kids would leave the adults talking and then sleeping inside and would row the pontoon boat back out to the drop-off and fish and swim at night. It was a working people lake and a fishing lake, a few boats would be scattered around spots where the fish were known to bite, but no other boats were ever on at night.
One night, while diving into the starlit blackness, we boys were teaching ourselves to swear. We’d swear clumsy. We’d swear creative. We’d howl with laughter, shout out any of words we knew we weren’t for some reason supposed to say, hold our breath and do a front flip into the dark unknown. It takes a minute after that move to get a sense of what direction is up. There’s no light calling you towards it, offering you breath. Eventually, though, gravity will help.
In the morning over eggs, bacon, and powdered donuts, my mother said “You know, voices really fucking carry over the water at night.”
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